As the sun dips behind the evening clouds, staining the equatorial sky a brilliant orange, seven-year-old Josephine Atim pounds away at rocks with an aging and worn hammer.
”I am breaking these stones to make some money,” she whispers shyly, pausing briefly as dozens of other youngsters, some as young as five, continue to smash stones into pebbles to earn a meagre wage.
As with countless other children who swarm around this camp for internally displaced persons (IDPs) in war-ravaged northern Uganda’s Pader district, the innocence of youth for Josephine is a distant memory.
The pebbles created by their arduous work will be used to cement the bases of camp latrines — ten jerry cans of stones are enough for one base and the children receive 300 Ugandan shillings (17 US cents, 14 euro cents) per can.
”No, I do not enjoy breaking these stones,” she says staring at the ground. ”But in order to get money, I have to do this every day.”
Like the other children here, Josephine attends school in the morning but from lunchtime until dusk, she works, a moppet forced into early adulthood by the nearly 20-year-old Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) insurgency.
A desperately overcrowded and ramshackle collection of mud and straw huts some 350km north of Kampala, the camp at Patongo is one of many here housing nearly two million people seeking refuge from the conflict.
In squalid conditions, Patongo’s 40 335 inhabitants shelter from the brutal treatment accorded northern Ugandan civilians by the rebels who are reviled internationally for killing, maiming, raping and abducting their victims.
Apart from families forced to put their children to work for a tiny income, the cramped and unsanitary environment of the camps, had led to a steep increase in exposure to disease. Patongo is no different.
Malaria, diarrhoea and other water-borne diseases, including cholera, are common as are cases of pneumonia, malnutrition and worm infestation, particularly among young children, officials here say.
”The problem is education,” says Benson Nyeko, a clinical officer at Patongo Health Centre run by the charity Médécins Sans Frontières, lamenting a shortage of personnel and supplies to deal with preventable diseases.
”We don’t have enough medicine and medical staff are very few,” says Patongo camp leader Okello Celestino. ”Water is also a very big problem for the people here because the boreholes are not enough, we need more to be constructed.”
Henrieke Hommes, an official with the Swiss relief agency MedAir, says overcrowding and resulting water shortages are a real problem in Patongo and other camps.
”Due to the amount of people crammed in the camps there is not enough water for everyone,” she said, noting that residents receive only eight to ten litres of water per day, far less than accepted standard of 15 litres.
Food is also a source of a real concern, Okello says, noting that the once-lush farmlands of the north lie fallow due to insecurity that has grown as the Ugandan military attempts to re-assert authority, provoking rebel attacks.
Even though elusive LRA leader Joseph Kony and his top commanders — indicted last year by the International Criminal Court on war crimes charges — now appear to be on the run, their fighters are still an active force.
Last month, a small group of rebels launched an attack on Patongo and although it was repulsed, it has underscored the daily danger faced by residents of the camp and those who want desperately to leave.
”It is still too unsafe for people to return to their villages but some have begun to move out near the roadsides where there is some security,” Okello said.
On a visit to Patongo earlier this month, United Nations humanitarian coordinator Jan Egeland decried the conditions and what he said was a lack of international understanding about the severity of the situation in northern Uganda.
”Everybody has to do more,” he said, urging the government to improve security but also calling on relief groups to boost their humanitarian efforts within the camps.
”We as aid organisations have to … improve conditions,” Egeland said.
”Still too many are dying from lack of sanitation, lack of proper care.”
In the meantime, the residents of Patongo face a bleak and uncertain future.
As one inhabitant said: ”People here in Patongo don’t exist to live; they Just exist to survive.” – AFP
